huffman-coding

Noun

(countable and uncountable, plural Huffman codings)

(computing theory) An entropy-encoding algorithm used for lossless data compression, involving a variable-length codetable derived from the estimated probability of occurrence of each symbol (so that more frequent symbols take less space to store).

huffman coding - Computer Definition

A relatively simple entropy coding technique that assigns codes to symbols, such as characters in an alphabet, numbers in a numbering scheme, and punctuation marks, with the length of the code corresponding to the probability of the occurrence of the symbol.The technique was developed by David A. Huffman when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Huffman coding is the basis for Modified Huffman (MH), a run-length encoding compression technique. See also MH and run-length encoding.

A statistical compression method that converts characters into variable length bit strings. Most-frequently occurring characters are converted to shortest bit strings; least frequent, the longest. Compression takes two passes. The first pass analyzes a block of data and creates a tree model based on its contents. The second pass compresses the data via the model. Decompression decodes the variable length strings via the tree. See LZW.